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Plenty of Fish Says Scaling for Free Doesn't Pay
Plenty of FishCEO Markus Frind, famous nerd hero for making over $10 million a year from Google ads on a free dating site he made and ran all by himself, now sees a problem with the free model:
The problem with free is that every time you double the size of your database the cost of maintaining the site grows 6 fold. I really underestimated how much resources it would take, I have one database table now that exceeds 3 billion records. The bigger you get as a free site the less money you make per visit and the more it costs to service a visit...There is really no money in being free and we have to start experimenting with other models now or we won’t be able to compete in 3 or 4 years.
As one commenter succinctly put it: the “golden time” of AdSense is over. Time to look at costs. The POF architecture is to run scarily huge tables on single machines. They also buy and maintain their own SAN. So it seems scaling up is what is increasing costs and decreasing profits. I wonder if the economics of cloud storage and cloud architectures might have a more linear cost curve?
Comments
Re: Plenty of Fish Says Scaling for Free Doesn't Pay
He should shard his database, by user. We run a site with 5 million members, on PostgreSQL, and just did that, which allows us to scale out horizontally pretty easily as we need. Each user's data (profile, friends lists, etc etc) is kept together on the same shard. When the existing shards reach capacity, we just add a new one.
Re: Plenty of Fish Says Scaling for Free Doesn't Pay
Hang on... that sounds like broken logic.
Sure, if you've managed to go down a scaling dead-end you might find it expensive to scale further, but doesn't translate to your revenue model.
If you get a static revenue per user from a free model, you're still only going to get a static revenue per user on a paid model... unless he's suggesting a system whereby membership gets more expensive as the number of users grows.
Markup Issue
Hello,
Other commenters point out the flaw in the argument: whatever the revenue strategy what does not scale is reliance on a single gigantic database. This is Scalability 101.
My concern here is that you wrapped your excerpt in a PRE tag instead of BLOCKQUOTE, making it hell to try and read on a small screen. Please fix your markup, unless you would prefer not to be read by folks using mobile devices. Thanks!
Sincerely,
-daniel
Re: Plenty of Fish Says Scaling for Free Doesn't Pay
Since the key use case for a dating site is cross user queries, trivial sharding by user will not give linear scalability. If it's permissible to limit searches to a geographic area, sharding by zip code prefix could work acceptably. Otherwise some form of distributed index server will be needed.
Re: Plenty of Fish Says Scaling for Free Doesn't Pay
Why dont you just cut down some of the countries.. like that ones with alot of scammers like russia etc.... then you will have less fakes taken up alot of room.. I dont know .. lol just a suggestion.
Re: Plenty of Fish Says Scaling for Free Doesn't Pay
Just prune your database.
Delete all the users that didn't login in the past 12 months.
That would cut million users that are not interested anymore.
Re: Plenty of Fish Says Scaling for Free Doesn't Pay
I don't know what to beleive when I hear this guy talk about POF. This particular comment doesn't make any sense to me. I mean he's running this thing on a handful of boxes without any staff isn't he? How expensive can maintenance be getting compared to those huge AdSense revenues (even if he's had to buy very expensive boxes and SANs)?
Unless he's not really bringing in $10M of course....
Re: Plenty of Fish Says Scaling for Free Doesn't Pay
I am a co-founder of a free dating site (LiveDateLove.com) but since it's much smaller than PoF I don't experience these problems yet. I did read that Marcus spends 10K/month on the server but compared to his income it's nothing. So I don't know what he means by the increasing cost... Did he provide any figures? Perhaps this article is just another way of him advertising his business. I noticed how much he likes to brag either about his income or his server or how genius he is. And by the way, he DOES NOT run this site by himself, he gets a lot of help from the web hosting company. They're the ones looking after his servers and his site. And his girlfriend helps him out with customer support.
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